Visual-inertial solution to camera tracking for SLAM, odometry or online reconstruction is an active field of research [1]} and has been successfully deployed in practice.
IMUs provide acceleration data at a high frequency and can be used to predict inter-frame motions serving as good initialization for gradient-descent-based optimization [2]}.
The gyroscope sensor of IMUs (especially built-in IMUs in commodity RGB-D cameras) is more effective for measuring changes in orientation than estimating translations. Many researchers found the translation error too large to be useful in tracking, either used as pose initialization [3]} or for joint optimization [4]}.
